


you're gonna make me lonesome when you go

by janie_tangerine



Category: Wild Cards - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 02:47:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9858566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: in which Jetboy goes to see Belinda before going after Dr. Tod.





	

**Author's Note:**

> tldr: when I read Wild Cards years ago I was horribly sad that poor Jetboy didn't even get to hang out any further with Belinda and I kinda shipped them so I wrote this thing out of utter frustration ie I NEED THAT GUY TO HAVE HAD A JOY BEFORE DYING. Then I left it there because there literally was no fandom on ao3, now I was going through my old stuff and figured why not post it at least it's *something*. So. Basically that's exactly what the tags say.
> 
> Obligatory disclaimer: absolutely nothing belongs to me and the title is from Bob Dylan.

Jetboy walks up the stairs at eight PM, September 14th, 1946.

He has no clue of what to expect this time, but he kind of hopes that she’s not waiting for anyone tonight, also because he doesn’t have too much time in the first place. He should have been out and heading for Jersey already, according to whichever high-up decided that his retirement was done for the moment, but he did manage to bargain with them. He has three hours before he has to meet a government car in front of Bee’s door, and hopefully he won’t have to wait them out on the doorstep.

Who knows.

He clutches the package against his chest and knocks on the door.

She opens the door and she definitely wasn’t getting ready for a night out - she’s dressed in loose trousers and an old flannel shirt. No nice dress or garter belts this time - her blonde hair is falling loose over her shoulders and her eyes go wide in surprise when she sees him.

And then she smiles, a small, delighted grin that makes his heart skip a beat or two.

“Bobby,” she says, sounding as delighted as her smile, “long time no see. You haven’t called, have you?”

“I - sorry. I figured you would have been - busy,” he blurts, not knowing how to put it without saying _I thought I would come in with my books and sweep you off your feet and instead you were waiting for someone else, and of course you would have, who was gonna wait for an orphan who spent half a damned year MIA on a deserted island and spent the best years of his life flying a plane during a war?_

She sobers up. “That didn’t work out. You could have called. And - Bobby, what’s going on?”

“What?”

“Come on, don’t play dumb. You’re fidgeting.”

Well, he might as well say it now.

“I have to leave for Jersey in - three hours or so. The military called.”

“Weren’t you retired?”

“Yeah, well, sounds like there’s some crazy guy who wants to drop some kinda bomb on the city tomorrow. Which is the only reason why I managed to convince them to give me a few hours to visit you before I had to leave. But - yeah. Apparently retirement’s not an option for now. So - y’know, I wanted to go see _The Jolson Story_ this evening, but then I got the call and I figured I’d ask you to come with me, but then again if we should -catch up or anything then why waste that time at the movies? What I mean is - we could hang out until they come get me if you’re not busy? If not I can go, it’s not -“

“Bobby, shut up and get in,” she says, smiling a little less brightly, and he walks inside.

Both of his books are on the coffee table in her small living room, he notices.

And then he remembers the package he brought with.

“Can I ask you one favor?”

“‘Course you can.”

He hands her the package.

“That’s - I don’t think this is gonna end badly, but just in case, I had this deal. To publish my memories. That’s everything I wrote up until now. It probably ain’t that good, but I figured I’d leave it with someone I trusted rather than, you know, letting it be in my house. So - if you could keep it until I’m back -“

“All right,” she mercifully interrupts him, her fingertips running across the plain brown paper the manuscript is wrapped in. “All right, I’ll put it somewhere safe and be right back. Do you want some coffee? It’s a bit late, but -“

“Yeah. Yeah, sure, I can do with coffee.”

“Good. Just - you can sit, I’ll be back soon.”

He sits as he watches her head for what’s presumably the bedroom. His leather jacket is probably too heavy - it’s nicely warm in here, he doesn’t _need_ it, but he still doesn’t take it off and stares at the books he brought her on the coffee table, taking in shallow breaths and trying not to think about where he’s heading.

A crazy guy who wants to drop a bomb on New York.

Couldn’t he just have done that _before_ he got rescued on that island? At least he’d have sat this one out.

Bee comes back with coffee not long later. He can’t help noticing that she brushed her hair.

“Here you go,” she tells him, and he grabs the mug. It’s hot, and the coffee’s good, and he still feels somewhat cold.

“Thanks.” He takes another sip, then holds the mug with both hands. He’s sure his fingers are slightly shaking.

“You know,” she tells him, and suddenly she’s not looking at him anymore but staring straight at those books on the coffee table. “You know, when you come back, if you want to see _The Jolson Story_ , maybe - maybe you could call. I could come with you.”

He stops mid-sip and puts the mug down on the table, turning to his side - she’s still looking down at her hands.

“Well, I’d be glad to buy your ticket,” he croaks, and he doesn’t think he’s ever sounded this unsure in his entire life, but - wasn’t it what he had hoped to hear when he showed up the first time with his new dress that felt so uncomfortable?

He reaches out tentatively, his fingers covering the back of Bee’s wrist, and he feels ridiculous - he’s a damned war hero, he shouldn’t feel awkward just trying to hold a girl’s hand, except that it’s not like he’s ever done that for real, has he?

He doesn’t expect her to look down at his hand and then turn her palm upwards so that it slides against his and their fingers thread together.

“When I told you I could call my - my date off, that evening, why did you say no?” Bee asks him, breaking a silence that was getting entirely too heavy.

“I thought you had moved on,” he answers truthfully.

“That’s why you never called, didn’t you?”

“It is,” he admits.

“And didn’t you think of anything when I said I wished things were different? Then again, they are now.”

He swallows once, twice, then raises up his free hand and brushes his fingertips against the back of her head. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to do here, maybe he just want to see how she’ll react, and when her free hand touches his collarbone he thinks, _I was an idiot_.

“Well, I never moved on,” he says, and it sounds damn lame to his ears, at least.

“Yeah, Bobby, I think I had that figured out. Now, did _you_ have figured out that I didn’t move on either?”

He had said, _just like in a movie_ when he had walked out of her building the last time. But he was wrong. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just like in one kind of movie, and this is just another kind of, because it damn sure feels like a movie when he dares to cup the back of her had for real, her newly brushed hair incredibly soft against his fingers, and she sighs at the touch before raising her head and moving closer, and closer. How is it called when things suddenly go slower, he thinks, slow-motion? Yeah, it’s called like that, and that’s exactly what he feels right now. It’s as if time slows down while he moves closer to her, too, and their lips meet in the middle. It only lacks the music, and if they were in a movie he’d see shades of gray instead of blonde in her head, and she wouldn’t see his brown leather jacket but a dark gray one, but hey, movies are in color now these days. That was one of the reasons he was so excited for _The Jolson Story_.

But then she kisses him for real, slipping her tongue inside his mouth, and _that_ ’s what makes him forget about movies of any kind whatsoever. He tries to get on with the program, painfully aware that she’s the one who knows how things are supposed to go, but it doesn’t seem to matter - she’s smiling into it, and a moment later she’s straddling him on her sofa, and when she moves back he has to gasp for breath. Her knees are firmly clamping his thighs, her hands are grasping at his jacket now, and she’s still smiling, her cheeks flushed and her hair getting messy all over again.

“I think I got that figured out now,” he finally says, and she laughs at that, and for a moment he remembers telling her some joke at the orphanage years ago and her face breaking out in such a huge grin, he couldn’t believe he was the one who put it there.

“Better late than never,” she says, and then her hands go to his belt.

“Wait,” he says, even if he wants her to go on so much he could burst with it. “I mean - I might not come back tomorrow. And - if you don’t want -“

“Bobby, thank you but I don’t think I need that kind of chivalry from you. And I know that’s not what you came here for. And I do want. Now, do _you_?”

What a question, he thinks as he moves upwards, grabs the lapels of her shirt and drags her forward, kissing her again and getting the flannel open - he manages three buttons and then he’s touching her breasts, all smooth firm flesh under his rough fingertips, and she moans into his mouth when it happens. He has no damned clue of what he’s doing here, and so he just sticks to that until she breaks the kiss, gets rid of the shirt for real and dares him to take off her bra - it takes him three attempts but then it’s on the ground, and she’s moaning into his mouth again as he cups her breasts in the palm of his hands.

“How long do we have?” Bee asks when they’re both shirtless, his shoes have been kicked out towards the corner and his cock is painfully hard while pressing up against her leg.

He looks at the clock on the counter.

“I gotta be downstairs in two hours.”

“Better put ‘em to good use then,” she says, and then winks at him once before opening his belt and throwing it on the ground as well.

The thing is that he hadn’t realized it’d be _so much_ , and she has barely touched him before he’s coming all over her hand, and he feels mortified the moment it happens, but she laughs instead, hard enough that a couple tears fall from her eyelids, and then moves so that they’re inches of space between them again.

“Let me guess, not many girls for you in the army?”

“Geez, I was fucking >thirteen, Bee. Or well, not even that - when I turned eighteen I was stranded on the darned island. Even if I had wanted anyone that wasn’t you, you think they’d have given me the time of the day?”

And then he realizes what he had just said.

_Shit_.

Her eyes are wide all over again, her mouth falling open just slightly.

“What did you just -“

“I thought - I thought it was obvious?” He’s feeling like a real idiot right now. War hero, his ass. “And - shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t -“

“Bobby, I think this would be a good time for you to keep your mouth shut and let me show exactly how much you shouldn’t be worrying,” Bee whispers, sounding - now she sounds _happy_? “C’mon, that was nothing. I mean, I should be flattered, but I’m pretty sure it’d have been the same with anyone else.”

“That’s not -“

“Come on, not if you never had any since you left the damn orphanage and were thirteen or what have you. And hey, you should be good to go again in a few.”

“In a -“

“Just let me do some work here,” she says, winking at him, and then her hand is on his spent dick again and -

_And_ five minutes later he’s definitely good to go again. He’s good to go as she strokes him slower than before, he’s good to go when she puts her mouth on him later and his hands are tangled in her hair, pulling just slightly, and he’s good to go when she gets rid of her jeans and goes back with her knees around his thighs and sinks over him, and when she’s so wet he can’t believe it’s because of _him_ , and right, she gets off him just before he comes, he gets why, and after then he’s definitely spent, but it doesn’t mean he can’t do his part.

Hell, he’s done his part for his country and gave his best years to it, sure as hell he’ll do the same for her, and so he insists and when they flip positions and it’s her hands in his hair as his tongue runs along the soft, hot flesh inside her legs, he commits to memory each moan that escapes her mouth, and then he slips his fingers inside her (his roughened, calloused fingers that will forever remind everyone that he could have only gotten them during a war when most people his age at worse had rough hands from honest work, not flying planes or shooting guns) she moans even louder, and tells him that they feel amazing, if he please could go on, and of course he does.

He does until she’s as spent as he is, and then does it some more because she asks, and then he licks them clean and she tells him that it’s a real pity they haven’t been doing this for long, and by the time he has to dress again, it’s twenty minutes until they come pick him up and Bee’s hair is a complete mess. Her face is red, her clothes are stained, her couch is stained and she’s smiling so wide that he can’t help smiling back at her just as wide.

Then he has to put his clothes back on - he washes quickly in her small bathroom, gets dressed again and grabs his jacket from the couch. She opened the window, but the room still reeks of sex. He doesn’t think he minds it, though.

“So,” he says, hoping it doesn’t sound awkward, “don’t go see _The Jolson Story_ without me, ‘kay?”

“Sure, but the first thing you do after you stop this madman is calling me so we can make an appointment. Deal?”

“Deal,” he answers, leaning down to kiss her again, and again, and he doesn’t move until he hears a horn sounding down in the road.

“This is all wrong,” Bee snorts as she leads him to the door. “Usually it’s the other way around.”

“I don’t really mind. I’m okay with it being the other way around.”

She shakes her head and kisses him again, briefly.

“Then I’m buying you the tickets. The day after tomorrow, theater down the street. I think they show it at seven.”

“Well, see you two days from now at seven then.”

“You’d better be there,” Bee says, and then she closes the door in his face - good thing she did. He’d have never left otherwise.

He smiles to himself now as he walks down the stairs.

It’s not raining outside.

He wonders if this is how people feel in those movies where everything works out in the end, because sure as hell it seems like _this_ is the way they should feel.

—

There’s no showing of _The Jolson Story_ at seven PM on September 16th.

—

It’s September 15th, 1963, when Belinda buys a ticket for _The Jolson Story_ at the smallest of the three movie theaters in Jokertown. It’s a retrospective of musicals from the forties.

The kid selling her a ticket has green skin and pale blonde hair. Not that anyone would expect any different out of one of the Jokertown movie theaters, but it’s not as if she minds. She was lucky that she had been inside the house on September 15th, 1946 - knowing in advance that someone might blow _something_ over the city had made her think that she’d be better off not getting out of the house for a couple days.

Belinda walks inside the cinema, a bag from the bookshop near home clutched in her hands. There’s a copy of _Godot is my copilot: A Life of Jetboy_ , brand new, and she’s read just the first chapter while waiting for the bus to Jokertown, but she already knows it won’t be anywhere near accurate.

She thinks about the package wrapped in brown paper still sitting at the back of her wardrobe. She read what Bobby had written of it, of course, and then when people looked her up after it turned out she was the sole beneficiary of Bobby’s will and came searching for her, she didn’t tell them she had it. She inherited all of his things, and promptly left gifted them to that wax museum in Jokertown when they asked her if she was amenable to lend them Jetboy’s jacket for an exhibition. She knew that he had wanted to give his plane to a museum, so she figured he’d have been all right with it.

She picks a seat in the back and waits for the lights to go out.

When she walks out of the cinema, no one’s around. Of course they’re not. There’s the parade today, and everyone’s on the other side of the neighborhood. Even the kid with the green skin isn’t at the booth anymore - there’s an old man now instead. A nat, or so it looks like. He’s reading a book and looking thoroughly bored with it, so Belinda moves on. She knows she’s gonna have to walk home - no buses are around after the parade.

She’s so distracted that she doesn’t notice bumping into a twenty-year old kid with pink hair and eyes. Well, the eyes are sort of pink - the irises are pink, the rest is entirely red. It looks like the kid hasn’t slept in a long time.

“Sorry,” she tells him. “I was distracted.”

“No - no problem,” he kid croaks. He does sound sleep-deprived. “I wasn’t looking either. Figured everyone’d be at the parade.”

“Never thought there was much to celebrate,” Belinda sighs.

“Yeah, lady, I hear you. Have a good day,” he says curtly, and then runs off towards the inner neighborhood.

Nothing to celebrate, indeed, Belinda thinks, her bag feeling heavier with each single step.

She can’t even go to the monument and tell Bobby that he’d have liked that movie - it’s going to be swamped with people, where the statue is. But then again it’s not the place where she wants to go. That’s a statue to Jetboy, not Bobby Tomlin, and it’s not as if Belinda ever cared much for Jetboy in the first place.

There’s a bench along the road.

She sits down and reads chapter two.

At chapter five, she stands up and puts it back in the bag, then she looks up at the sky.

They never recovered the body, of course.

Belinda likes to think that it means Bobby somehow never stopped flying, even if the thought isn’t that much comforting. It’s actually depressing, but it still sounds better than _they never found a body and he avoided a mass slaughter but he couldn’t stop that virus and he died for nothing and why_ him _we were supposed to see_ The Jolson Story _together and I just had him back but then they took him away again and I only have bits and pieces of that book of his to remember him by_.

“Bobby, you said it wasn’t much good, but you got that wrong. That one I just threw out couldn’t hold a candle to yours,” she whispers to herself.

Then she looks back at the road. She thinks about the empty apartment she never moved out of and the sofa she never changed and those two signed books he brought her that are still on the nightstand in her bedroom.

She looks back up at the sky. It’s strangely clear. It’s warm, all things considered.

“You’d have liked it,” she whispers, and she doesn’t stop the tear that falls from one of her eyes and lands on the concrete. She… didn’t particularly like it - admittedly, she fell asleep somewhere in the middle, musicals were never her thing and she still likes black and white better than color - but Bobby would have. He’d have liked that music, and he’d have liked that ending, he’d have appreciated that it wasn’t some happy scene that wrapped everything up in a neat bow.

She’ll also admit that she had felt a bit like Jolson’s wife at the end, except that at least she had some years with him, while she and Bobby never had a chance in the first place, and she’s not entirely sure that he’d have eventually been happier flying military planes, not when he was that young, but it’s not as if they ever could even find out.

Too bad, wasn’t it?

Belinda heads straight for the nearest trashcan, throws the book inside it - she’s never going to finish anyway, she knows that - and heads home.

 

End.


End file.
